The Devil Has all the Best Stories

Theologian James Smith says that marketing is the answer to Christianity’s decline. Not an advertising campaign, but a serious rethink about engaging the imagination, and tackling such tricky concepts as love, longing and erotic desire.

Transcript

James Smith: (In interview) Marketing understands that we are not primarily thinkers. Marketing knows that we are primarily lovers, and so marketing doesn’t try to communicate information to us about products to convince us to buy them; it tries to co-opt us into a whole story about what happiness is, about what the good life is, and thereby tries to capture our imaginations and our loves and our longings so that we think happiness, the good life, is found in association with that stuff.

David Rutledge: Theologian James K.A. Smith. And if you’re wondering why he’s talking about marketing and love in the same breath, then listen on. James Smith wants to understand why the secular world is so successful in engaging our imaginations, and whether we can apply this understanding to reviving the Christian message.

Not that James Smith is advocating anything as crass as a marketing strategy for Christianity. The first of his recent New College lectures at the University of New South Wales in Sydney was entitled ‘Erotic Comprehension: The Bodily Basis of Meaning’.

Embodiment—the part our physical bodies play in shaping our minds—has long been a problem for Christian thinkers, particularly the reformed church, with its emphasis on the intellectual. But James Smith argues that meaning is a product of our imaginations as much as our intellects, and that Christianity needs to think harder about such tricky concepts as love, longing and desire.

Well, today we present James Smith speaking at the university of New South Wales, and in an interview I recorded with him subsequently.

James Smith: (In lecture) The theologian William Cavanaugh has a brilliant little book called theTheopolitical Imagination, in which he asks this question: How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world to kill people he knows nothing about? Hear that question again: How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world to kill people he knows nothing about?

Well, I suggest to you he is not merely convinced. He does not merely enlist for an idea, though he certainly signs up for an ideal. But the ideal to which he is devoted, whether it’s the nation or freedom or God or whatever it might be, that ideal is not just something that he knows; it is something that he loves. It’s not a matter of his having acquired some new bit of knowledge that then tips the scale and makes it all of a sudden seem rational for him to do that. No, the provincial farm boy is primed to be a soldier because he has been conscripted into a mythology. He’s been conscripted into a mythology so that he identifies himself within a story that has seeped into his bones at levels that even he isn’t aware of.

The provincial farm boy is persuaded not in the regions of the intellect primarily, but rather on the register of the imagination. The dynamics of conscription, of our identities, our desires, our loves, our longings, operate more on the imagination than the intellect. When I am talking about imagination, what I mean is almost something like a quasi-faculty that we have, by which we construe the world that we inhabit on a pre-cognitive level. That is, we make sense of our world on a register that is fundamentally aesthetic and because of that is intimately linked to our embodiment, so to say that as embodied creatures our orientation to the world sort of begins from and lives off of the fuel of our bodies, including the images of the world that are absorbed by our bodies. So on this picture the imagination, then, is a name we’re going to give for this sort of pre-intellectual way that we perceive and understand and make our way in the world.

If I can give you just a simple analogy, it’s a kind of perception that is pre-intellectual; that’s what I’m calling the imagination. And if I invite you now to perceive this chair, what you’ve just done is you’ve sort of made it an object of your perception and it is there for you in this kind of standout way; you are perceiving it and you are seeing it. But the fact is, what I’m talking about is you all perceived the chair as soon as you came in. In fact, you all perceived and imagined, if you will, you all construed this as a chair as soon as you sat down. Now, when you did that, you weren’t thinking about anything, right? That wasn’t a primarily intellectual act; it was almost a way that your body interpreted the space.

Well, if you think of that as a rough analogy, when I’m talking about the imagination tonight, I mean a way of construing and understanding and making sense of our world that is on that sort of bodily order, the imagination as a way to name this everyday capacity we have for understanding our world. So I’m going to sort of heuristically employ the word ‘imagination’ in that way and then try to make this case: For that provincial farm boy that Bill Cavanaugh was talking about, dying in a far-flung trench for the nation or freedom or the flag makes sense for him not because this is a valid conclusion to reach on the basis of the evidence, but rather because he has absorbed a fundamental orientation to the world that has a more visceral logic about it.

And, by the way, I’m not here to talk about soldiers and armies and wars, what I’m saying is, ultimately what I want to suggest is, that there is an analogy here to what it would mean to be conscripted into the gospel, what it would mean to be conscripted into the body of Christ. So I would say the provincial farm boy’s imagination has been conscripted, has been drafted, by a secular liturgy, a secular liturgy. Becoming a soldier takes practice. There is an intense novitiate that characterises becoming a soldier and it is an intense bodily formation. It is a liturgical form.

I will be honest with you; a lot of what I’m trying to do is redeem the ‘l’-word for evangelicals. I want you to understand that. For me, liturgy is not a bad word; in fact, I’m using the word quite broadly to just name a particularly loaded kind of practice, which is why you then have to recognise that there could be something like—in scare quotes (you call them scare quotes here?)—’secular liturgies’.

The formation of the imagination is a liturgical effect. So the focus of my lectures is to consider more carefully and deeply the dynamics of how that happens, how that formation happens, to appreciate, you could say, the dynamics of persuasion as an operation that works on the body by means of a story. And you’ll hear I’m really interested in liturgies as basically this intersection of story and embodiment. Any adequate account of liturgical formation, whether Christian or secular—and I hope that will make sense in a moment—needs to attend to the centrality of the imagination and that requires attending to the complex features of our embodiment. Because it’s precisely this embodiment that makes us, let’s call it, narrative animals. Some people get offended by the animal language; I’m just talking about Aristotle. Aristotle famously said human beings are rational animals—I think that’s true, but I also think that we are maybe even more fundamentally narrative animals.

So accounting for the dynamics of liturgical formation requires recognising and understanding this intertwinement of embodiment and story, of, let’s put it this way, kinaesthetics and poetics. So I’m going to formulate an axiom. Here’s an axiom. An adequate liturgics must assume a kinaesthetics and a poetics. This is what I get paid to do, people, is to come up with big terms like this, but what I really want to convince you about is all Christians should care about liturgics.

Because what we’re talking about is Christian formation. And if you are going to have an adequate account of Christian formation, discipleship, I actually think you need an account of embodiment, kinaesthetics, and of the aesthetic side of that—let’s call it a poetics. Because liturgies are, I will suggest, compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body; liturgies are compressed, performed stories that get hold of our imagination through the body.

So if we are going to account for how the provincial farm boy is persuaded, or, friends, how the martyr is convinced, or how so many of us, actually, are quietly conscripted into the armies of consumerism and nationalism and narcissism, or how Christians are made, then we need to account for how worship works, how worship works. And such an account will need to appreciate that the Spirit of God marshals the dynamics of body and story. And that’s… the intersection of those is what I’m talking about as liturgy.

Now, why would this matter? What is the upshot of such an account of how worship works? Is this just some academic exercise, an attempt to explain what isn’t a mystery? In fact, might I actually be doing something even worse, which is actually naturalising the work of the Spirit of God by explaining it? Doesn’t such a project really have implications for discipleship and the nitty-gritty realities of Christian formation? I actually think this is really important stuff—this is why I care about it—and I think it has two significant implications.

First, I think if we understand and appreciate these dynamics of formation, embodiment, liturgy, narrative, I think it will displace a naive intellectualism that evangelicals have adopted which has undercut our ability to actually have really robust Christian formation. OK, that’s… I’m saying that as an evangelical. And because of that—this is why this is important—if you sort of overestimate the importance of the intellectual and if you mistakenly believe that Christian formation is primarily a matter of intellectual input, you will underestimate all of the ways that secular liturgies get hold of your hearts and your loves and your longings on the level of the imagination. OK, that’s one of the things we need to talk about.

Secondly, if we start to appreciate this intertwining of embodiment and liturgy and narrative, we will start to appreciate the bodily basis of worship and the entwinement of that with the aesthetic and the narratival, which should then birth in us a new intentionality about what Christian worship should look like; that is, I think we will think differently about what Christians ought to be doing when we worship if we appreciate this.

And I’m not talking about, by the way, the next best thing or reinventing the wheel or coming up with the new thing that we’d never thought of before. Actually, it’s worse (laughs). What I really want to suggest to you is that we should re-appreciate the implicit wisdom in historic Christian worship practices and approach the renewal of worship with an appreciation of this bodily basis of meaning. I think this is about remembering things Christians used to know.

James Smith: (In interview) I think Augustine is this incredibly energising figure for me, because he’s living at the intersection of politics and faith, church and thought. He’s kind of the consummate Renaissance man, in the fifth century. And I think we’ve inherited a view of Augustine where he’s just anti-everything; he’s defined by what he’s against.

If you return to the text I just think it’s very hard to see that as really the animating centre of what he’s about. I think Augustine is animated by strong positive convictions about who God is, about what’s going on in the operations of grace in cultural life. So, yeah, a lot of what I’m interested in is trying to undo that caricature of Augustine to see that he’s actually somebody who has incredible nuance about what political life looks like for believers in a pluralistic context. I mean it has so much relevance, I think, to today.

David Rutledge: What about his take on embodiment, though, and the flesh? This is something that—I mean I know you’ve written that God reaches us through our bodies, gets to us through our bodies. If you set this against Augustine’s picture of the rebellious will as manifest in sexual desire, right, where our bodies kind of rise up in spite of the best efforts of our moral inclinations—and it’s not just Augustine, it’s a commonplace in Christian theology that our bodies are sites of resistance to God as well as the sort of thing that you’re on about—how do you work with that?

James Smith: But for Augustine the trumping conviction is we believe in the resurrection of the body. And so I think you do see a development across Augustine’s corpus, so I think the early young Augustine when he’s first converted is still in the throes and thrall of a certain Platonic devaluing of embodiment. And I think if you just look at the early works you get that. But by the time you get to later in his work, there are two convictions that have got hold of him. One is the resurrection of the body, which just means he can’t be a Platonist anymore about embodiment; and the other is the sacraments—the whole Christian theology of the sacraments is this taking up and affirming of the material world.

So I actually don’t think you will properly understand Augustine if you don’t realise that an animating core conviction for him is the goodness of creation. If all you’ve ever heard is this caricatured Augustine, that makes no sense whatsoever, but I think if you read the Confessions, if you read the City of God, this fundamental affirmation that anything that is is in virtue of coming from God and God is good, therefore anything that exists is good insofar as it’s been created, that’s at the heart of Augustine’s whole metaphysic, his whole ontology and his whole account of reality.

And so it’s almost like his Christian convictions press him later in his life to affirm the importance of materiality embodiment as something that’s affirmed in the Incarnation; you know, if the body was essentially bad, how on earth could God ever mix Himself up with that? And yet that’s the heart and soul of the gospel and of the Christian faith. I think it’s affirmed in resurrection; I think it’s affirmed in the sacraments.

And this is why I think desire is actually so central in Augustine. The theme of love as desire is part and parcel of this affirmation of the kinds of—for lack of a better term—sort of erotic creatures we are by nature of our embodiment.

David Rutledge: It’s interesting that you’re going to a pre-modern thinker for a kind of antidote to the rationalism of modernity, but postmodernity offers us a critique of rationalism as well, doesn’t it, that it has to do with the undecidability of things? Our bodies are seen as undecidable and sort of malleable. And I wonder to what extent that insight—the ambiguity of the flesh and the writers, the postmodern thinkers, that write about that—how does that figure in your work?

James Smith: I think you’re absolutely right that there is a lot of overlapping sensibilities and intuitions between a pre-modern thinker like Augustine and postmodern thought. Both of them in a way constitute a critique of a certain rationalism, a kind of thinking thing-ism that reduces human beings to just these brains on a stick, as it were. And I think it makes perfect sense—in fact, I’ve argued some places—that the most persistent and sort of coherent postmodernism will have to be a recovery of pre-modern intuitions.

So I think there’s a lot of overlap. I even think that someone like Augustine could resonate with certain postmodern themes about how rather underdetermined our embodiment is, if that’s a fair way of connecting with how you’ve just put it.

David Rutledge: Underdetermined…?

James Smith: Well, that in a sense that our embodiment is not just a given; it’s configured based on how we sort of orient ourselves. There’s a hermeneutic moment to this, there’s a way in which our construal of our embodiment can go in very, very different directions. And now obviously Augustine, as a Christian theologian, thinks that there are good ways to configure our embodiment and bad ways to do that, but he recognises that in a way you can create forms of life that order embodiment differently. And that’s… he would think that’s a bad interpretation, but it’s clearly something that can happen. You know, he recognises, maybe we could say, the contestability of our embodiment if I think that’s what he thinks is exactly what’s going on in a sort of sinful condition.

David Rutledge: When you talk about the contestability of our embodiment is that a similar idea to this postmodern idea that—I hate these terms like postmodern, but we’ll go with it—this postmodern idea that our bodies are in some sense culturally mediated—not just what we do with our bodies, but our bodies themselves?

James Smith: I think there is some sympathy between that and what Augustine would be about. I mean obviously there’s a difference here, in that Augustine thinks that there is a kind of ultimate take on who we are, what we are meant to be, what we are called to be, what our bodies are for, and that’s obviously what, sort of, the creator of our bodies has stipulated that they are for.

So on the one hand he’ll recognise that there is this ultimate criterion at play, but on a, if you could say, a horizontal level, he recognises that there are forms of life that constitute bodies differently. And if you don’t recognise that, he says, you won’t realise that, for instance, the rituals of the empire are something that are trying to make you a certain kind of person. And you are rather malleable, there is a certain malleability to the human person and the way our embodiment is constituted, so that the empire can get hold of you and make you a citizen, and that is now identifying for you but yet at the same time it’s a construal of who you are.

So in that sense the gospel and sanctification and the Christian disciplines are a kind of counter-formation, a counter-construal of that. So it seems to me the fact that he recognises those competing disciplinary formations—to use rather Foucauldian language—means that he appreciates some of those postmodern themes. The difference is that Augustine will never, ever, ever give up on a normativity in saying, ‘and this is the way we ought to be ordered.’

(Music)

David Rutledge: You’re listening to Encounter on RN, and a program featuring theologian James K.A. Smith.

From how we think with our bodies, by way of Augustine, desire and longing, James Smith tackles the equally tricky question of how we act.

James Smith: (In lecture) Much of our action is acting out a kind of script that has unconsciously captured our imaginations. And our imaginations are captured, by the way, by stories. And those stories condition our emotional perception of the world and that is what influences a great deal of our action. Now, I’ve already noted in some ways I am trying to push back against what I’m calling an ‘intellectualist’ model that a lot of Christians have unwittingly adopted, I think from sort of some bad moves that were made in modernity.

But here’s what I mean by an intellectualist model: The intellectualist model assumes that what I do is the outcome of what I think. And you might be saying, ‘Well, what are the other options? What are the other alternatives?’ See, on this intellectualist model, I see a situation, I consider my options, I think through the relevant principles, laws, duties, obligations and so on, I deliberate on those, I make a choice and then I act. So my action on the intellectualist model is the outcome of conscious, deliberative, mental, rational processes.

The problem is, we now know that that is not how we act most of the time. I know this is slightly disconcerting, but in so many ways I’m really interested in how recent conversations and research in neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology confirms what Christians knew millennia ago. But the one thing that we’ve begun to appreciate recently is that if you think of consciousness as a bit of an iceberg, if you think of the tip of consciousness, the tip of the iceberg, as your sort of conscious, mental, deliberative, rational choosing, that’s about seven per cent of what you do in a given day. And so much more of your action and behaviour is actually governed by processes under the water of that iceberg that psychologists like Timothy Wilson called the ‘new unconscious’, or they might also describe as ‘automated behaviours’. Don’t get too weirded out by that; it’s not actually biologically hardwiring, these are acquired habits that we have.

I’ll give you a very easy example to get this distinction. How many of you have ever taught a teenager to drive a car? I hope it never happens to you! I saw one person shake his head, ‘No.’ It is not a fun experience, because when a teenager’s learning to drive a car, everything that the teenager is doing is being run by that tip of the iceberg of consciousness. What do we mean by that? What we mean is they have to think through everything, right? Everything is ‘Check the mirrors. Look in the…’ Everything is being operated there; nothing has been automated.

Contrast that with us, who have a very bad day at the office, have a meeting that frustrates us, you’re driving home thinking about it the whole time and all of a sudden you’re in your driveway. And you don’t remember driving home. How could that happen? Because actually so much of it has become automated, you’ve acquired the habits, so that you can actually undertake that action without having to go through all the conscious, rational, deliberative choosing.

All right, I think this has very, very significant implications for how we think about Christian discipleship. What if Christian discipleship is acquiring habits of perceiving and acting that are automated? Don’t get too weirded out by that, because that’s just what ancient Christians meant by virtue. It’s virtue. It’s to have acquired these good habits.

All right, why does this matter for what we’re talking about? I think that a lot of Christians have unwittingly adopted the intellectualist model and they’ve assumed that what we do is the outcome of what we think. And if you assume the intellectualist model and you assume that what we do is the outcome of what we think, then all of your energy is going to be focussed on what? Getting people to think the right things.

I remember seeing an ad in a Christian magazine for a Bible memory verse program which had a man’s face, and emblazoned across his forehead it said, ‘You are what you think.’ And it was a Bible memory verse program, so the idea is, ‘If I am what I think and if I just fill up the intellectual receptacle with all of the right data and information and knowledge, then if I am what I think and if I can change what I think then I will change who I am and now I will be a disciple of Jesus and I will image God in that way.’

So it could just be that I lack sanctification, but do any of you have the experience of knowing exactly what you should do and not doing it? OK, phew, I was worried I was the only one for a second! Well, what’s that gap? What’s the gap going on between knowing what you ought to do and not doing it? In a lot of ways and in significant measure, it’s precisely because your imagination hasn’t been conscripted, right? Your character, your virtues, your habits have not been adequately habituated to a way of life, you haven’t automated those practices yet.

And I think that if we remain fixated on this intellectualist model which thinks that the solution to Christian formation is more and more information, we will not understand that there are other modes of formation that actually we need to redirect our loves and our longings and our habits and our desires. And, by the way, if we’re not doing that, there are plenty of other secular liturgies that are happy to do it for us. So if Christian formation is actually going to adequately counter the deformation of secular liturgies, it will never be enough to merely provide intellectual content, because that’s not what’s really driving the centre of our action.

David Rutledge: If we talk about desire and imagination—because this features in your work as well—I’m interested in the way in which our desires and our imaginations can take on a life of their own. And here I’m thinking of people like Georges Bataille and his notion of the sacred as being a little bit like the imaginary or the unconscious; you know, it’s like the place where we lose our heads and the place of erotic abandon and excess and very much an amoral zone.

And, you know, it’s a fascinating take on religion, but not unproblematic from a Christian doctrine point of view. If you’re working with an anthropology of desire and this embodied take on worship, what’s stopping you from ending up in that sort of dark seething sacred space? Or is nothing stopping you to go there?

James Smith: (In interview) The grace of God! Well, we would have to talk longer about why even, I think, Bataille’s take is a take, right? Do you know what I mean? So this is a construal; I think it’s recognising something that’s pushing back on us, that demands interpretation and an account, but you could sort of resist it and say, ‘Well, that’s an alternative interpretation.’

The French thinkers that I’m more indebted to are, say, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Pierre Bourdieu, who I think are looking at the way in which we kind of interpret our world to make sense of our worlds on a register that is quite bodily. Merleau-Ponty will even say, ‘My body knows things that my intellect does not.’ And following in the wake of Martin Heidegger and figures like that, I tend to use the word ‘imagination’ to name that sort of embodied intuition, that embodied way that we make sense of our world.

It’s getting at that notion of the imagination. It’s not just this productive, romantic, inventive thing; it’s also a sort of receptivity to the world that is tethered to our embodiment.

David Rutledge: It’s physical.

James Smith: It’s physical. There’s something about… there are ways in which I know my way around the world and I make sense of my world on this bodily register that I could actually never even fully articulate to myself. But that is not instinct, it’s not just hardwired biological conditioning: this is a way of being in the world that I’ve absorbed through practices, stories, images, that kind of have trained my unconscious, if you will, to perceive the world in this way.

David Rutledge: ‘Trained my unconscious,’ I mean that’s an interesting, ambivalent phrase in itself, given that the unconscious is commonly thought of that which is completely resistant to training.

James Smith: Right. And I think this is the difference between our inherited Freudian notions of the unconscious and what in cognitive science and neuroscience now is being called ‘the new unconscious’, which is the recognition that there are all kinds of sort of automated habitualities that we absorb in our being in the world, for lack of a better term, that are learnt, they are very much acquired, they are not just biological givens.

And so I’m always a little bit nervous to use the word ‘unconscious’, because I think it immediately takes us in this Freudian direction, which is then just this very given structural reality, but I think the newer discussions about the unconscious is recognising this acquired know-how that you absorb on this bodily register.

David Rutledge: So where does morality come in? I mean, what’s steering the ship in moral terms—and I’m using that rather dualistic image quite deliberately, because I think the dominant model that we have of morality is still very much that which controls and channels our desires, and it’s a process of rationally weighing up desires and impulses and deciding which ones are good and which ones are bad, or which ones are helpful and which ones are destructive. How do you see morality?

James Smith: Yeah, I think two themes of morality intersect with this model, because on the one hand there’s still a strong account that to talk about morality is to talk about normativity. So you could still have a strong account of what constitute normative or rightly ordered desires: that’s the one side of the Augustinian picture.

On the other hand, I do think this model pushes even Christian theologians and Christian believers to think differently about morality, because it’s not just a matter of how you think through the issues; it’s much more about how are you habituated to respond in different situations. So, for me, the upshot of this is actually a recovery of a virtue ethics tradition where if I am going to do the right thing, it’s not enough, actually, for me to have acquired the knowledge of the relevant moral rules and then intellectually processed the decisions I ought to make, because in fact a lot of what I do in a given day is not the outcome of rational, conscious deliberation; it’s actually driven by this sort of adapted unconscious that orients my stance towards the world.

So what I do in a given day is very much driven at the level of habit and habit now is the seat of a sort of moral stance, a moral posture, but I acquire that on levels that are not just intellectually processed. So maybe it’s the difference between a sort of law-centric account of morality versus a virtue-centred account of morality, where to act morally is not just to know what one ought to do, it’s to have become the kind of person who acts in this way.

(Music)

David Rutledge: So what we do, according to James Smith, defines us every bit as much as what we think. And if what we do can operate on the level of the unconscious, then our imagination—and how it’s manipulated—becomes a crucial part of our formation as moral beings. This brings us back to marketing, and to secular and sacred liturgies. It also introduces us to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and to some ideas about the erotic.

James Smith: (In lecture) Marketing understands that we are liturgical animals, that we are lovers, that we are longers, that we are shaped and primed by stories that capture our imagination. But we should know that, the church should be the centre that understands and appreciates that. So, if something like this model or argument is right, it will actually become a way to account for Christian assimilation to cultural forces. It actually helps you to understand Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism and all kinds of egoisms, because these –isms have had all the best stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies.

The proper response to that situation is to change our practice. It’s not just knowledge, right? I mean, I do think intellectual reflection on these matters is important; that’s kind of what we’re doing tonight. But what the impetus for that intellectual reflection should do then is prompt us to immerse ourselves in practices that will form us otherwise, to reactivate and renew those liturgies and rituals and disciplines that intentionally embody the story of the gospel and enact a vision of the coming kingdom of God in such a way that they’ll seep into our bones and become part of the background of our perceptions, the very baseline for our dispositions.

Another French philosopher, named Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has kind of given me a toolbox to help me articulate how it is and why it is that stories get hold of our body in such a powerful way. And, um, let me just give you a little flavour—because I need to give you the erotic comprehension bit, or you’ll go away disappointed. So Merleau-Ponty was a mid-twentieth-century philosopher, phenomenologist, who was incredibly attuned to the way in which we not only think our way through the world but we sort of feel our way through the world—let’s put it that way. And he was very much trying to overcome a dualism that we had inherited between mind and body, or soul and body.

And what’s interesting, when you read Merleau-Ponty, who as far as I know did not have any Christian sort of theological interests but clearly probably had some sort of Catholic formation, because he knows things that you couldn’t know otherwise, and in some ways he’s trying to fight a very reductionistic naturalism, and so you’ll hear Merleau-Ponty actually revive soul language, but on the other hand he’s also trying to fight a kind of Cartesian Dualism which thinks that we are just thinking things, and so really spends a lot of his time emphasising the importance of the body.

Let me give you just one theme from Merleau-Ponty that I think is suggestive. What I’m calling the imagination, Merleau-Ponty calls ‘praktognosia’—you can go impress friends at cocktail parties now with this word—it literally just means sort of ‘practical knowledge’, prakto-gnosia: knowing of practice. Let’s call it ‘know-how’, ‘know-how’. Look at this quote:

Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object with a praktognosia which has to be recognised as original and perhaps primary. My body has its world, or understands its world, without having to… [make use of my] ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’.

Merleau-Ponty was very interested in the ways that we kind of feel our way around the world. We have this sort of embodied know-how which—do you notice how he describes it?—which is ‘original and perhaps… [even] primary.’ In other words, this kind of embodied know-how is more fundamental than our intellectual processing. That’s what he’s calling praktognosia.

Let me see if I can give you an easy illustration of that. I grew up in this little village of Embro. I’m so glad; I love it, I love it that in corners of the world the name of Embro is uttered. It’s a town of 600—’town’!—hamlet of 600 people. It’s named Embro because it’s a very garbled, probably drunken, pronunciation of Edinburgh. It’s a big Scottish clan area. I grew up in this village and knew the entire village like the back of my hand, right? You ask me where the hockey arena is or the baseball diamond or the cheese house—we had a cheese house—there’s, you know, I know where everything is.

But if somebody drives through town, stops and asks me, ‘Could you point me to Commissioner Street?’ I would be at a loss, because I just grew up here—do you know what I mean?—I know where everything is, but I have never sort of stepped back into a kind of map-like knowledge. I know Embro in my bones. I know… I can picture… I can get to places with my eyes closed. That’s praktognosia. That’s know-how. It’s different than somebody who comes in as an observer, a spectator, and has map knowledge.

Friends, I’m trying to suggest that in some significant way Christian faith is a kind of know-how. It’s a feel for the world. It’s a way of understanding the world on a register and on a level that is deeper than and can’t ever be adequately articulated intellectually, propositionally. For all the people who are nervous, I think propositions are great—I’m not saying it doesn’t have doctrines, I’m not saying that beliefs and propositions aren’t relevant; all I’m saying is they are not the totality and they might not even be primary. They are articulations of what we know on this imaginative level, the story that we absorb in our bones.

Merleau-Ponty constantly returns to one case study of a gentleman named Schneider whose way of relating to the world has been completely transformed by a brain injury he received in World War II, I believe. Schneider cannot understand a story. If you tell him a story he will remember all of the facts, but he doesn’t get a story. He doesn’t understand the dynamics of narrative drama, of the rhythms of climax, crisis and so on; he doesn’t get character, he doesn’t get interplay. Why? Because story is something we all understand on a register that is different than the intellect. We get stories in our gut. We understand stories in this visceral register, this know-how, this praktognosia. And because Schneider doesn’t have it, he doesn’t get stories.

What does that mean for us? The way you understand a story is more than intellectual. It’s something even other than merely intellectual and propositional. You get it on a different register.

The second theme—and this is a little bit playful, I don’t know how this plays in Sydney—but the other theme that interests him about Schneider is Schneider also has no idea what to do with sexuality. I think this is really interesting, all right? Can you give me a little bit of a leash?

So, Schneider lacks any ability to absorb let’s call it sexual meaning. So, Schneider, if someone is flirting with Schneider, he totally does not get it. He doesn’t… in fact, all of the sort of a charge of a situation, where things start tingling for you a little bit ‘cos you realise that there’s something… there’s a sexual meaning in this context, Schneider doesn’t get it at all. He can give you a report of all the data, but it doesn’t mean anything for him. Why? Because the meaning is something more than the information and the data. There’s a kind of articulation of and an understanding of his world that happens on this erotic register.

This is quote four—we can’t leave without reading quote four: ‘At this stage one begins to suspect a mode of perception distinct from objective perception,’ and he’s talking about the perception of a sexual situation here, right, and which we’re only interested in analogously or allegorically, all right? ‘A kind of significance distinct from intellectual significance, an intentionality which is not pure ‘awareness of something’. Erotic perception is not a cogitation which aims at a cogitatum’; that is, it’s not just sort of an act of the intellect that aims at the object of the intellect. ‘Through one body it aims at another body, and takes place in the world, not in a consciousness.’

In fact, so what Merleau-Ponty says is that… a little later on he says, ‘There is an erotic “comprehension” not [on] the order of understanding,’ an erotic comprehension not on the order of intellectual understanding. I want to suggest that that’s a pretty provocative way to describe a Christian worldview: ‘an erotic “comprehension” not [on] the order of understanding.’ Keep in mind that erotic really is just talking about desire, longing, love. I’m an Augustinian. For Augustine we are desiring creatures. We long for God.

James Smith: (In interview) One of the things that I think is an important implication of this model of the human person as lover, as desiring creature, is you realise that we are what we love and we love what we worship, but we might not worship what we think, because the dynamics of liturgical formation you could say, are operative outside of what we traditionally associate with sacred spaces.

So I think Augustine thinks there is no secular, right? He thinks that spaces that we tend to think of as neutral spaces are actually loaded liturgically formative spaces; it’s just that they are forming your loves in very, very different directions. I think that’s exactly what he sees going on in the civic rituals of the empire. To him, those are competing liturgies. I think that is directly translatable to a lot of the practices that characterise consumer capitalism in a globalised world. These are not just things that we do; they do something to us. And what they do to us is teach us to love something as ultimate.

I think that there is a vision of the good life that is embedded in the market, that’s embedded in consumption, that is just antithetical to what the kingdom of God pictures as shalom, as flourishing. And trying to get people to feel that tension is a lot of what I’m interested in.

James Smith: (In lecture) In the opening of his Confessions Augustine says, ‘You have made us for yourself… and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.’ That is a desiring dynamic. We have been made to desire God and that is rightly ordered love. So to talk about human beings as desiring creatures is to say that in a way we are made to be erotic creatures, to desire God. And the effect of sin, by the way, is not that it turns off our love or longing or desire. The effect of sin is that it points our love in all kinds… we love everything but God. We are looking for love in all the wrong places. That’s the first half of Augustine’s Confessions.

So we are made to love, we are made as longers for God, we have an erotic centre, made to love God in that way. So then Merleau-Ponty’s theme becomes interesting: ‘an erotic “comprehension” not [on] the order of understanding.’ That’s a pretty provocative way to think about a Christian perception which is also a kind of visceral way of meaning the world and understanding it as God’s good but broken creation, which in turn calls and beckons to us for a response.

Such a constitution of the world is governed more by the imagination than by the intellect, which is why it is crucial to consider how we fuel and form the imagination. Cool, objective perception of the world will fail to properly understand the world and its call upon us as the garden we are called to cultivate, as the tragic arena in which we are called to compassion and forgiveness, as the field of the Lord in which we are called to both play and work, proclaim and praise.

If we only learn to think Christianly we run the risk of Schneider, calmly and coolly seeing what’s right in front of us without really perceiving what’s at stake. And what we won’t realise is that other stories, other liturgies are capturing our imagination, aiming our love toward rival kingdoms. Christian worship is more than its content and it means more than it says. Worship that intends to be formative and more specifically worship that intends to foster an encounter with God that transforms our imagination and sanctifies our perception, must be attentive to and intentional about the aesthetics of human understanding.

Christian worship needs to be an incubator for the imagination, inviting us into the real world by bringing us aesthetic olive branches from the coming kingdom, helping us to then envision what it would look like for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We will absorb this eschatological vision of shalom in ways that elude our awareness and the story will be incorporated into our bodies on an aesthetic register. So the whole of Christian worship must embody this guiding story in multivalent ways so that it becomes part of our background and sanctifies our perception.

In this respect, we might say that Christian discipleship is not only about the acquisition of a worldview but the inhabitation of a sensibility. To be formed in Christ for missional action is to acquire a temperament that guides us beneath and beyond what we think. And given that our perception is a motive embodied kinaesthetic intentionality a Christian passional orientation to the world will be less like an intellectual grid and more like a sort of style of comportment, a sensibility, a temperament that changes how we are in the world. That sensibility or temperament will significantly shape how we perceive things so that to be formed as image-bearers of Christ is to acquire a temperament that is indexed to the kingdom of God. Thanks very much.

(Applause)

David Rutledge: Theologian, James K.A. Smith, delivering this year’s New College Lecture in at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. And you can find out more about James Smith on our website at abc.net.au/rn; look for Encounter on the program list.

Technical production for today’s program was by Leila Shunnar. I’m David Rutledge.

Guests

James K. A. Smith

Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Congregational and Ministry Studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA